by Paul Horgan
By early June, Lamy was in Rome for his first visit ad limina to the Pontiff, and for his own recognition in person by the Vatican offices with which for so long he would have so much business from so far away.
The Eternal City was a meld of three elements—the ancient pagan imperial Rome, much of whose remains had been half-buried by the risen earth of centuries; the domed and palatial Christian city of the popes; and the very countryside itself. Groves of trees and open fields and much bare land were mingled with the works of man. Hillocks of earth rose gently upon the exposed upper portions, in marble or tawny brick, of ancient ruins; and everywhere he looked Lamy could see rising above the dirt streets the great baroque domes and tiled roofs, palace façades, and square stuccoed towers of the later city, while the open Campagna lay in view from any hilltop or at the end of any straight way. The via del Babuino leading from the Porta del Popolo to the Piazza di Spagna had country airs proper to a village street.
Lamy’s affairs were focussed in the great bureaux of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith whose immense offices were housed in a brown sandstone palace designed by Bernini at the end of the Piazza di Spagna where the street divided to flow past its walls. Its shallow stairways were wide and sweeping, taking the visitor from one pale vista of grand vaulted corridors to another, until he came to the reception rooms and finally the great inner office of the Vatican official who directed world-wide the Catholic mission activities. These continued in countries (of which until 1908 the United States was one) where the local Church was unable to sustain itself materially or to find itself so securely a part of national life as to justify separation from Rome in routine administration. Rome remained the fount of spiritual powers and hierarchical dispositions; and in her Christian history and the visible splendor by which she celebrated it, lay weighty confirmation of her authority for all her servants to see. Lamy, coming from his all but hidden diocese of towns and chapels built of the humblest dust, could be seen as a minister of the faith which bound the simplest of human situations to the might and glory of Christian Rome evolved through its own centuries from its underground beginnings to the universal Papacy of his own day.
His duties now began in the office of Alessandro Cardinal Barnabo, Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, with whom he would exchange a voluminous correspondence of increasing warmth and good feeling for many years. The Vatican palace and St Peter’s lay far across Rome from the offices of the Propaganda Fide, where in rank upon rank of shelves, through vast, lofty open chambers, the archives of all the foreign missions, including his own, were kept in folios of heavy sheepskin tied with rawhide thongs and lettered and dated on their thick spines by quills holding brown ink. Until his period of brief exile, ending in 1850, Pius IX had lived in the Lateran Palace. Since his return from Gaeta he had occupied the Vatican, and at the proper moment, Lamy would be conducted there for his first audience with the pontiff who had decreed him bishop. The Cardinal Prefect of the Propaganda was received twice a month by the Holy Father. Perhaps Bishop Lamy would be presented on one such occasion.
But before that there was much to lay before Barnabo—one affair in particular, and Lamy came prepared with documents. This was the still-disputed ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the villages and county, known variously as Mesilla or Doñana or “Condado” whose names were taken by different parties, according to whose interest was involved, to designate either a cluster of villages, or one village, or a great tract of almost thirty thousand square miles across the southern area of New Mexico-Arizona. The civil jurisdiction of the tract had first been agreed upon in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which on faulty map lines gave it to Mexico. But later boundary surveys raised serious doubts, and the New Mexico territorial government claimed the land all the way to the northern line of the state of Chihuahua, running due west to the Pacific from the Rio Grande’s southeastward bend at El Paso. The Mexican government refused to recognize this claim, and in March 1853 Governor Lane of New Mexico, on his own authority, had sent volunteer territorial troops to occupy the area. President Santa Anna of Mexico responded by ordering Mexican troops north to keep it by force of arms. Just as a new war with Mexico seemed imminent, the matter was resolved when Senator James Gads-den, of South Carolina, who had been sent to Mexico by President Pierce to negotiate the purchase of the disputed land, concluded his mission. The Gadsden Purchase, made final on 30 December 1853, for a payment by the United States of ten million dollars, provided a new southwestern boundary and made possible a railroad line to the Pacific within United States limits. The troops were withdrawn, the civil crisis was over, and the final official act relating to the 1846 war with Mexico was done. New Mexico was firmly defined in her permanent boundaries, within which lay Doñana, Mesilla, and the Condado. Under the terms, and within the logic of the Baltimore Council’s original request urging the establishment of the vicariate apostolic and now recently the diocese of New Mexico, by which the national political jurisdiction would be matched by the ecclesiastical, it was clear to Lamy that no obstacle could possibly remain to his administration of the disputed areas.
But Zubiría of Durango had claimed these same areas in his conversation with Lamy and his letter to the Vatican in November 1851, and he had no intention now of changing his views on the issue, no matter what boundary commissions, treaty officers, or international purchase agreements might decide. Lamy had “tried many times to reach the Most Reverend Bishop of Durango and discuss this matter,” but got nothing in return but “elusive answers” from the see of Durango “which they thought would satisfy …” Now, after the conclusion of the Gadsden Purchase, Lamy’s only hope of affirming the integrity of his proper diocese lay with the Vatican, and he set out the case in the grand chambers in the Piazza di Spagna. In doing so, he reiterated details which he had already written from Santa Fe before coming to Rome.
He recalled to Barnabo that the papal bulls named him as bishop of New Mexico with “no exceptions” of territory within that diocese. It was therefore natural that he should reclaim as belonging to his diocese that important part of the New Mexico territory which was always included within it. The part in question was the Condado de Doñana, which enclosed the southern limits of the territory of New Mexico and the northern limits of the state of Chihuahua. The Condado was always included in New Mexico before the latter was set up as a bishopric. Now that it belonged by purchase to the United States, it inevitably became a part of the diocese of Santa Fe. Practically speaking, the county was very far from Durango, and much nearer to the city of Santa Fe. Moreover, it was not hard to imagine the difficulties which could be expected for the United States government if a Mexican bishop would attempt to exercise a jurisdiction in United States territory. What was yet more, the Mexican government “never pretended to make laws for Doñana,” and (since the end of the recent war) “the inhabitants always voted in the New Mexico civil elections.” The people of Doñana could not “understand why the exception has been brought up, especially since they are in New Mexico, nearer to Santa Fe, whence they can receive spiritual aid, whereas they are hundreds of leagues from Durango and the roads leading there are exceedingly dangerous.…” The disputed county was increasingly populated by Anglo-Americans who resisted Mexican jurisdiction. Lamy feared that such people would “manifest their displeasure by refusing to accept the sacraments from the hands of priests from Durango,” and he feared also that if Mexican priests should come, they might even be mistreated by the Americans.
Careful minutes were made in the Propaganda of all such points, and in due course were relayed to Bishop Zubiría for his comments. The matter would take time, thanks to the slow ocean crossings and the deliberate pace of bureaucratic affairs. When Lamy’s statements reached Zubiría from Rome instead of from Santa Fe, his first reply would be simply to send to the Vatican, in all respect, a notarized copy of his original letter of November 1851, quite as though no significant events concerning the matter had since taken pla
ce. How much time the dispute would subsequently take, in groaningly slow exchanges between Santa Fe, Rome, and Durango, nobody foresaw in 1854. For the long moment, there was a lucid Vatican memorandum: “It must be decided if to Santa Fe there belongs what in New Mexico belongs to the United States.…”
Lamy had other affairs to discuss which referred to Zubiría, revealing serious doubts concerning funds and properties belonging to the parish church of St Francis and the chapel of St Michael, “both in the city of Santa Fe,” which had recently been taken from them. In the first instance these had been possessed personally by a priest “by the name of Felipe Ortiz” and, in the second, by his mother.
In the light of Lamy’s description of the relation of the former rural dean to the diocese of Durango, Cardinal Barnabo wrote flatly to Zubiría on 17 June 1854, while Lamy was still in Rome, “I trust that Your Excellency will understand that in view of the office and the authority given to the Bishop of Santa Fe, it is right and just that all the goods pertaining to his churches be administered by him. I trust that you will help to clear this situation and make sure that all which is due to the above-mentioned Bishop will be arranged to his satisfaction.” With this instrument, ex-Dean Juan Felipe Ortiz entered into the long memory of the Vatican, and Zubiría was given notice of the official position toward Lamy. If Ortiz, or any other disaffected New Mexican, had made representations to Rome against Lamy before now, there was no record to indicate that any discussion of any such act took place. Soon enough, such concerns were to come under examination in the Propaganda, and not Lamy, but his vicar general, would speak to them.
But meanwhile, Lamy was in good health and occupied with other matters. The bishop shopped for furnishings for his churches, acquired some paintings which he planned to take home with him, and found a Spaniard, Father Damaso Taladrid, who would go to New Mexico with him to stay. Finally came the moment for Lamy’s audience with Pius IX.
The papacy—and its occupant—gave Rome its greatest spectacle, as Henry James saw soon after Lamy’s first Roman visit. “Open-mouthed only for visions,” James left the breakfast table to observe, in the Via Condotti, “the brightest and strangest of all.” The perspective was suddenly emptied of traffic by “mounted, galloping, hand-waving guards,” and while all doffed hats and knelt, he saw (less reverently than a Roman) “the great rumbling, black-horsed coach of the Pope, so capacious that the august personage within—a hand of automatic benediction, a pair of celebrated eyes which one took, on trust, for sinister—could show from it as enshrined in the dim depths of a chapel.”
Lamy found Pio Nono genial, keen, and generous. The Pope was a man of fine looks and great charm. An Oxford college master thought him “a capital fellow.” He was also a hero of auguries—on his way from his old episcopal see of Imola to Rome for the conclave in which he was elected to the chair of Peter, a dove had repeatedly fluttered down to the roof of his coach arousing the acclaim of the faithful. He was also a suddenly conservative survivor of the republican furies which had ended the temporal rule of the Papacy over most of Italy. An aristocrat, he always presented an impeccable appearance. His voice was famous for its fine sound. An affable smile lighted his full and handsome face and his large dark eyes. He was sixty-one years old at the time he received Lamy. Of more than officially devout habit, he held great veneration for the Virgin Mary, and was already formulating his plans to promulgate as dogma the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. People referred to him as “the Pope of prayer.” It is likely that he felt Lamy’s quiet devoutness, in all its peasant simplicity and episcopal dignity. Lamy made only one reference later to their exchange in the audience: among the matters he discussed with Pius was the flagellant brotherhood of the Penitentes in his diocese. What to do about them? The Pope made it clear that the bishop should try to disband the order—a view with which Lamy was in sympathy.
For the rest, the Pope signalized Lamy’s audience in a superb and concrete fashion. He presented his forty-year-old bishop with a chalice out of the papal treasury. It was attributed to a goldsmith of the sixteenth century and spoke richly of the Renaissance style in its design. Its height was over eleven inches, the mouth of the cup measured four and a half inches in diameter, and the base six inches. The cup of the chalice consisted of two parts—the vessel proper, which was of gold as plain and pure as water in its brilliant reflections, and an embracing support of worked gold which, like the major knurl and the base, depicted sacred subjects in carved medallions—variously, St Peter with his keys, St John with an eagle, St Paul and his sword, the crown of thorns, the monogram for Ave Maria, Christ and two apostles at the Last Supper, Gethsemane with an angel holding the cup of agony and Christ gazing at it, and the crucifixion with St John and the Holy Mother at the foot of the cross. It seemed clear that by a gift of such magnificence the Pope intended to show particular favor to his visitor, whose report of the desert diocese could refer to few enough of even the simplest sacred accessories. The chalice, for all its rich repousse, was extremely light in weight. It was fitted upside down into a carrying case of black leather lined in red baize. The lid was locked with brass hasps, and to the top was affixed a brass handle, by which the case could be strapped to a ring on a saddle when in future years the chalice might accompany its new owner on pastoral journeys across the reaches of his desert. For the moment, Lamy consigned it to the care of Barnabo at the Propaganda.
On 30 June, his Roman duties done, Lamy wrote to Barnabo from Civitavecchia, where he was about to embark for France with business in Clermont, Lyon, and Paris. Father Taladrid was there to see him off, and to carry the letter to Barnabo in person. “I am again writing you to entrust the chalice to the Spanish priest Don Domaso Taladrid who is going with me to New Mexico and who must leave in about eight days to meet me in Paris.…”
In Clermont, Lamy knew all the emotions of homecoming, and of visiting as a bishop the seminary of his youth. With the support of the bishop of Clermont, he carried the same appeal now to the seminarians and young priests which he had heard from Purcell in the same place so long ago. His description of his needs brought a good response. In addition to Taladrid the Spaniard, he could now add to his homeward party three priests, Pierre Eguillon, N. Juilliard, and Antoine Avel; Jean Guérin, a deacon; Eugene Pollet and Sébastien Vaur, subdeacons (all of the diocese of Clermont); and also two laymen—another Vaur, who was a brother of the subdeacon, and Rimbert, their cousin. The latter two would go to Santa Fe, and there begin their studies in a “petit séminaire” to be founded by Lamy.
Etienne Lamy, the head of the family, and the father of the young Marie, was in Lempdes, and the bishop went there to see him. Their parents were both dead. In this visit, Etienne agreed to lend his brother twenty-five thousand francs, to be repaid in four years. With this fund to give him a degree of certainty, Lamy moved on to Lyon, presented his case for more help, and received assurance there from the council of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith that he could “rely on extraordinary help” from that quarter. From there he proceeded to Paris, where he stayed once again with the Sulpicians. There he found Father Taladrid waiting for him, with his papal chalice, and there he spent most of his time with the Paris office of the Society, trying to give them in detail a description of a state of affairs they could not readily imagine.
How to make the priestly administrators at Paris see his land? The distances, the remoteness of the people in the great landscape, the heat of summer, the year-round droughts, the poor clay villages lost in the hill-folds under the mountains, the spiritual life once manifest under the Franciscans now all but asleep under the Mexican clergy, and the consequent uninstructed gaieties and vices of the population, the hovels which served as chapels and churches? What must be thought of altar candles made from sheep fat and set into discarded bottles for candlesticks? The diet of cornmeal and jerked meat on which the parish pastors had to subsist? Church revenue consisting of donations of animals and grain which the diocese must then sel
l in turn to the United States Army quartermasters in order to obtain money which was to be divided among the parishes in order to provision the priests and pay expenses for repair and maintenance of the chapels? In the pueblos, the Indians farmed little gardens to sustain the missioners who rode by the Rio Grande or over the deserts to visit them. There were ten thousand Catholic Indians to serve in their pueblo churches which had been empty of resident pastors since the withdrawal of the Franciscans in the 1820s.
Even the positive aspects of his report led to the same purpose—the need for funds, priests, and religious. The small community of nuns at Santa Fe were “doing well,” but he was already in debt for four years on their account alone. He expected three more Loretto nuns to join him to go West. When the Paris Society allocated twenty thousand francs in reply to his appeals, he thanked them earnestly, for he needed it immediately to buy “many things at as low prices” as he could—catechisms, prayer books, school books, whatever else might be needed for the new preparatory seminary he would establish for the “many vocations for the priesthood” which he hoped to find locally, for he thought he would never again return to Europe.